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LOS ANGELES – The wife of one of Lance Armstrong's former teammates said Wednesday she has spoken to a federal agent investigating the seven-time Tour de France winner and other cyclists.

Betsy Andreu, the wife of former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, said she has talked with Food and Drug Administration agent Jeff Novitzky about Armstrong, but declined to discuss details. She said in a phone interview that her husband has also talked to the agent.

Novitzky did not give her any details about the investigation or who else had been contacted, she said. Other Armstrong teammates, including riders George Hincapie and Tyler Hamilton, have reportedly confirmed that they have been contacted by investigators, but they have also declined to give details.

Betsy Andreu has claimed that Armstrong admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs in a hospital room in 1996 while battling cancer.

Armstrong vehemently denies doping, and he and his attorneys note that the cyclist has never failed a drug test though he's been tested hundreds of times. Armstrong has also denied Betsy Andreu's version of the hospital room discussion.

Andreu said she expects the federal inquiry to show that she has been truthful about the incident.

"Lance pays his PR firm hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote himself and to smear those who speak the truth about him," she said.

"I have something that they don't have and that's the truth," she said. "And I am overly confident that will come about. It will show all along I have said nothing but the truth."

Andreu's contact with federal investigators was first reported Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Novitzky and a federal prosecutor have been handling an inquiry into allegations of organized doping in professional cycling, including whether Armstrong and members of his United States Postal Service team may have been involved.

By ANTHONY McCARTNEY – Thu Sep 23, 12:57 am ET
LOS ANGELES – A longtime friend of Lance Armstrong's told a federal grand jury that she never heard the cyclist admit he used performance-enhancing drugs, the woman's attorney said Wednesday.

Stephanie McIlvain, also a business associate of Armstrong's, appeared before the jury hearing evidence connected to allegations of doping in professional cycling during a daylong session.

"She testified that she had never heard Lance Armstrong say he had taken performance-enhancing drugs," said McIlvain's attorney, Thomas H. Bienert Jr.
The testimony contradicts claims by Armstrong rivals that he acknowledged using banned substances 14 years ago when he battling cancer.

Bienert said McIlvain had never been pressured by Armstrong or others to lie. She was Armstrong's liaison at sunglasses-maker Oakley during the cyclist's record seven Tour de France victories. Oakley has been a longtime Armstrong sponsor.
McIlvain was present in the hospital room where Armstrong was being treated for cancer in 1996, when former teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife, Betsy, claim the cyclist told doctors he used performance-enhancing drugs.

Armstrong vehemently denies that he cheated — or that he made such a statement — and McIlvain has previously testified in a civil case that she didn't hear Armstrong admit to doping in that conversation.

However, in a phone call secretly recorded by Tour winner and Armstrong critic Greg LeMond, McIlvain seemed to take a more ambiguous stance, saying that she heard the hospital conversation and would testify in a lawsuit if subpoenaed. However, she never said exactly what she heard.

Unauthorized versions of the LeMond-McIlvain conversation have long been available on various cycling websites.

Bienert said McIlvain was truthful when she told the jury that she never heard Armstrong admit that he doped.

"Any comments she made suggesting the contrary were simply gossip, speculation and opinion with people she thought were her friends, like Betsy Andreu," Bienert said.

In an e-mail, Betsy Andreu accused McIlvain of lying under oath Wednesday. "Stephanie not only talked about Lance's use of performance-enhancing drugs with me and Frankie but with many others as well."

She said there will be "overwhelming" evidence to support her claims that Armstrong said he used performance-enhancing drugs.

Armstrong became a more important figure in the probe this spring after disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis dropped long-standing denials and admitted he used performance-enhancing drugs. In doing so, he accused Armstrong and others of systematic drug use. Landis won the Tour in 2006, but was stripped of his title for doping.

AFP/File – Pierre Bordry, the controversial head of the French anti-doping agency seen here in 2008, announced his …

– Fri Sep 24, 2:35 pm ET

PARIS (AFP) – Pierre Bordry, the controversial head of the French anti-doping agency announced his resignation on Friday with cycling legend Lance Armstrong, with whom he regularly clashed, greeting the news with a brief "Au revoir Pierre".

"Normally my term finishes in July but I will quit the agency as soon as my successor is named," said the 70-year-old, who had been in charge of the AFLD for five years.

"There are a certain number of decisions that must be taken for the future of the agency" that he preferred to leave to his successor, he added.

Bordry's AFLD was in charge of testing at the 2008 Tour de France which revealed several positive tests in the peloton.

The substance detected was CERA, the new third-generation EPO.

One year later, the AFLD accused the UCI of favouritism towards the Astana team of Alberto Contador and Armstrong.

Bordry, who also regularly clashed with the International Cycling Union (UCI) over testing, said earlier this month that he was ready to co-operate with a US federal investigation into seven-time Tour de France champion Armstrong.

Former US Postal teammate Floyd Landis has claimed that he, Armstrong and other riders at the team -- which existed from 1997-2004 -- were involved in systematic doping practices.

Armstrong has vehemently denied the allegations, and has questioned the credibility of Landis, a man who denied for four years that he doped despite testing positive and losing his Tour de France title after winning the 2006 race.

Landis's claims have however led to the launching of a federal investigation which is being led by US Food and Drug Administration special agent Jeff Novitzky, who was in charge of the BALCO investigation into the use and distribution of designer steroids and which led to a jail term for former sprint queen Marion Jones after she was found guilty of perjury.

Just minutes after hearing of Bordry's resignation, Armstrong wrote on his Twitter site: "Au revoir Pierre".

MELBOURNE, Australia – Disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis says he waited almost four years to reveal his doping because he knew once he'd admitted lying, he would not be believed about the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs in the sport.
After years of denials, Landis — stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title because of doping — admitted in May to using performance-enhancing drugs and accused others, including former teammate and seven-time Tour Lance Armstrong, of doping. Armstrong has vehemently denied the accusations and his attorney has described Landis as a "serial liar."

Landis, speaking at an Australian conference on the eve of the road cycling world championships, said Tuesday that until more people come forward, cycling will continue to have a problem with drug cheats. "Until I can sit here, and a lot of other people can sit down and talk about how it came to be that way, it's going to be hard to find a solution," he said. "If I can be a catalyst for that, so be it. I don't care to take any credit for it because part of why I'm doing what I'm doing is for my own conscience and my own well being. "As much as it hurts to sit and tell my mom I lied, and to tell other people that I lied, it's better than the alternative."

The American acknowledged he waited too long before coming clean.
"I knew that having defended myself in the beginning, and having lied about never having doped, that no matter when I changed the story and no matter when I I decided to tell the details of what I'd done, the argument was always going to be the same. It was going to be that I shouldn't be believed now," Landis said.
"It took me longer than it probably should have."

Landis' allegations prompted an ongoing and wide-ranging U.S. federal probe centering on Armstrong and his associates. The investigation is being pursued by U.S. prosecutors and Food and Drug Administration agent Jeff Novitzky.
Landis said doping was endemic in cycling when he was caught.

"There were plenty of good people in cycling who made the same decisions I did," he said. "And it was never their intention to cheat anybody. It was never their intention to hurt anybody, it's just that it was so commonplace that you could rationalize it in your mind that you weren't hurting anybody."

A federal grand jury sitting in Los Angeles has been hearing evidence in its doping probe, and investigators have contacted American riders, sponsors and associates of Armstrong.

"I really didn't want to put anyone else through (what I went through after being caught)," Landis said. "It was an unpleasant experience to say the least. And even to this day I wish there was a way to tell the truth without getting anyone else involved.

"I can say first hand, leaving me out of it or whatever anyone's opinion is about me, there are good people in cycling that made the same decisions I made and there are people I don't like who made the decisions I made." Landis' involvement in the New Pathways for Pro Cycling conference held by Deakin University at Geelong, west of Melbourne, was met with intense criticism from the world championships organizers, who withdrew their support for the event.
At the time, Landis said he hoped to participate in the conference so he could be a "catalyst for positive change."

Landis was circumspect throughout his participation during a 90-minute panel session alongside international academics and anti-doping experts. After the conference he declined to speak about specific incidents or riders, and would not comment on the ongoing investigation.

Landis is not accredited for the championships, but says he will be watching the races.

He's got to face the music. Witch-hunt won't go away until they net the biggest fish of them all; if that is the case and if need there'll be. Suing each other won't do any good until the verdict is finally unveiled.

There are so many problems now in the world - recession, global warming, so many people starving ... Doping is so minor, at least they won't hurt other people. And the governments are spending millions of dollars on it. Just totally waste of money.

PARIS – For Lance Armstrong, it became a tradition. On the triumphant last day of his Tour de France victories, the champion cyclist and his teammates celebrated by riding past chattering crowds and the leafy trees that line Paris' most famous boulevard, the Champs-Elysees. They radiated bonhomie, smiling and sometimes waving star-spangled banners. Armstrong and Co., the scene suggested, was one big and happy cycling family.

Reality, however, was not so cut-and-dried.

Even with riders who were integral to Armstrong's unprecedented run of seven consecutive Tour wins, the single-minded Texan remained somewhat aloof. His teammates watched Armstrong's back on France's sun-seared roads, elbowed aside rival teams, carried his water bottles, shared meals, bus trips, and helped to construct the story of the cancer survivor who tamed cycling's most mythic race. But, some of them also say, they never got to intimately know the man in the winner's yellow jersey. After they and the crowds went home, some never had much contact with Armstrong again.

That contrast between the public and guarded sides of the man who revolutionized France's storied race with his modern American ways could become a hurdle for U.S. investigators trying to corroborate allegations from Floyd Landis. One of 23 support riders without whom Armstrong might not have won so many Tours, Landis claims that doping was part-and-parcel of being on his teams and that Armstrong cheated, too.

Armstrong has always insisted that he rode clean. He says Landis lacks credibility. After quitting Armstrong's team, Landis won the 2006 Tour but was stripped of the title for doping. Having denied it for years, Landis now acknowledges that he cheated but says others did, too.

The elaborate and systematic doping Landis describes — he alleged, most notably, that Armstrong and his riders shot-up in full view of each other in 2004 — would have required considerable levels of trust, connivance and conspiracy to remain hidden. But that stands at odds with the way some riders recall life inside Armstrong's U.S. Postal squads. Simply put, some say, Armstrong never let them get that close.

Steffen Kjaergaard rode at Armstrong's side for his second and third wins, in 2000 and 2001. He remembers the victory parties and the one-starred Texas flag that Paris' famous Crillon Hotel flew in Armstrong's honor. But he says he is stumped by Landis' allegations because coming "from a team that I was a member of, that is so far from what I have been a part of, or seen, or discovered myself."
"If some of that is just a little bit true, I must have been extremely naive," he says.
"No, no," he chuckles when asked if he ever saw Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs. "Floyd's stories ... are hard to believe."
Peter Meinert-Nielsen, a Dane who rode with Armstrong on his first Tour win in 1999 until he dropped out on stage 13 with a bad knee, says the Texan "was always friendly and a great person to be with" but that unlike in other sports, friendships rarely blossom in cycling because riders don't often train together.
"You are more or less only together when you ride. You don't get a close relationship," he says.

"Cycling is a working place like any kind of working place. There are some people you get along with better than others. Lance and I got along pretty well. He asked that I be on the team that rode the Tour de France. He knew he could rely on me as a helper. He knew that if I had been told something I would do it. He trusted me. He knew I would ride 100 percent for him."
"He is the greatest personality I have ever been racing with. He had a great power. I am certain it was a strong will and authority that made him win. He's a one of a kind," Meinert-Nielsen says. Although he also adds that if there was any doping then he wouldn't have been privy to it "because I wasn't with him, I didn't share a room with him."
Says Colombian Victor Hugo Pena, another ex-Postal cyclist who rode the Tours of 2001-03 with Armstrong: "Some people want me to destroy Armstrong and try to affirm that everybody was doping.
"This did not happen during my time with the group. I have good memories of the team and of Armstrong; for him only grateful words. We had a good relationship."
Pavel Padrnos, who rode the 2002-05 Tours with Armstrong, says the Texan was good at lifting teammates' spirits at the end of long days.
"When you have nine riders at a big table every night for three weeks for dinner day after day, he was one of those capable of entertaining all," he says. He dismissed Landis' allegations, saying: "It seemed to me that he wants to sell his story and it's written in a way to be of interest to anybody."
In his one of his autobiographies, "Every Second Counts," Armstrong says "teammates have an odd relationship; they float somewhere between acquaintances and relatives."

While Armstrong speaks with affection of Americans like George Hincapie — "like a brother to me" — some other riders get little more than a mention.
Armstrong says he and team director Johan Bruyneel spent years "carefully identifying, recruiting, and signing the kind of people we wanted to work with" — riders who were "willing to sacrifice" and "who rode with 100 percent aggression."
"We didn't accept slacking," he says. "But we encouraged good humor, because we believed it was excellent painkiller."

Armstrong's teams were multinational, with non-Americans outnumbering Americans by nearly 2-to-1 when rosters are tallied from his seven winning Tours. Because of the language mix, Armstrong says they sometimes communicated in "a kind of pidgin or shorthand." But Pascal Derame, a Frenchman on the 1999 team, doesn't recall much conversation.
"We didn't say much to each other," he says of Armstrong. Asked about doping, he said: "Nobody ever did anything in front of me."

Another rider, Spaniard Roberto Heras, refused to discuss Landis' doping allegations. "I have nothing to say. It is an ugly subject, a disagreeable subject and I don't want to talk about it. It is respectable to not talk about it," Heras says.
After quitting Armstrong's team, he failed a doping test at the 2005 Tour of Spain and was banned for two years. Manuel Beltran of Spain and American Tyler Hamilton — as well as Landis — also failed drug tests after leaving Postal's Tour teams and were banned, while American Frankie Andreu told The New York Times that he used the banned blood booster EPO while preparing for the 1999 Tour he rode with Armstrong.

The rolling three-week circus that is the Tour does not leave much time for socializing. To survive, riders must sleep as much as possible, gulp large meals for energy, salve aches and pains. Every day, there are hotels to get to, bags to pack and unpack. Armstrong also had television and press commitments and doping controls to satisfy. He usually rode the Postal bus with his teammates to each day's start. But when he finished far ahead, he sometimes wouldn't hang around for them at the end.

"He was extremely focused on getting back to the hotel as soon as possible, get on the message table as soon as possible, get recovered as soon as possible. Sometimes there was a car waiting for him," Kjaergaard says.

They ate meals together but were never close and Armstrong was "very selective" in his choice of close friends, he says. "Probably I fit into the team for a couple of years because I had no problem accepting that. I had my friends and he had his."
Beltran adds: "Obviously he's a man with a lot of extra commitments within the team so he wasn't always around like everyone else ... Although he might not have many friends, the ones he has are authentic."
"There were a few people (on the team) that he didn't get along with," says Meinert-Nielsen. "That always happens. If there was someone he didn't like, that person found out pretty quickly. He didn't tell them directly but you can always get a feeling that there is something saying 'I like or dislike you.' He was pretty tough about that. There were very few people who really got close to him. Including (Americans Kevin) Livingston and Tyler Hamilton. And, later on, George Hincapie. We, the others, we were more the working guys ... But that is what we got our salaries for. The plan was not that we going to be best new pals."
Armstrong has 2.65 million followers on Twitter. Meinert-Nielsen is not one of them. He says they have not kept in contact. Beltran failed a doping test at the 2008 Tour and says he lost contact with Armstrong after that. Kjaergaard retired in 2003 and says he's had no contacts with Armstrong for years. Heras, too, is no longer in touch, saying: "I wouldn't say we lost our friendship, but we don't have a relationship. I haven't talked to him again."
"You get a new life after cycling," says Meinert-Nielsen, who stopped riding in 2001. "The contacts we had then were pretty much superficial."

SI reports new information in the case against Lance Armstrong Read more: http://spo

"Sports Illustrated is reporting new information about embattled, seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, who is the focus of a federal grand jury inquiry in Los Angeles. The investigation is headed by Jeff Novitzky of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who previously investigated Barry Bonds and Marion Jones.

Agents have been looking into whether Armstrong was involved in an organized doping operation as a member of the team sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service from 1999 to 2004, and since August the grand jury has been hearing testimony from Armstrong's associates and confidants. In light of those proceedings, SI writers Selena Roberts and David Epstein reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of sources in Europe, New Zealand and the U.S. for a story in the Jan. 24 issue of the magazine, which will be available on newsstands Wednesday.

According to the story, "If a court finds that Armstrong won his titles while taking performance-enhancing drugs, his entourage may come to be known as the domestiques of the saddest deception in sports history."

Chances are, he did it and indeed was the instigator for everyone else. Everyone else got caught, he didn't. Now all there is to prove is his former teammates words (which might not count much. As AE says: Not all that is countable, counts; not all that counts is countable.). Trust there are still shreds of evidence somebody is holding on to (when the price is right; it'll/they'll come forward not just to testify BUT more importantly get rewarded for that valuable info). Better stick to Formula One Racing.

So much jealousy because one guy pedals a bike faster than hundereds of others for 7 years. If he doped they would've caught him by now, nobody can keep buying designer drugs in for that many years without being caught. Unless they have any evidence it's all just what people think they heard or have made up.
F1 Racing, they may not be doping but Ferrari are definately bribing the stewards.

Chances are, he did it and indeed was the instigator for everyone else. Everyone else got caught, he didn't. Now all there is to prove is his former teammates words (which might not count much. As AE says: Not all that is countable, counts; not all that counts is countable.). Trust there are still shreds of evidence somebody is holding on to (when the price is right; it'll/they'll come forward not just to testify BUT more importantly get rewarded for that valuable info). Better stick to Formula One Racing.

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US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know".

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